Enough people were duped into handing over their cash to see Big Momma's House for producers to greenlight a sequel. Not surprisingly critics weren't impressed with the imaginatively titled Big Momma's House 2 in which Martin Lawrence indulges in "more flaccid fat-suit antics", but audiences were a little wiser too. It notched up only half the takings of the original.

The Big Butt Of All Jokes

A featurette on visual effects takes us beneath Big Momma's blubber and reveals the cracks. If you think that sounds disgusting, think of the poor special effects bod who had to spend weeks digitally airbrushing BM's bare butt to achieve just the right level of "boom jiggle". It appears the fat suit wasn't a good fit for Lawrence necessitating a lot of work in post-production. Ironically though they had to shrink a baby by 20 per cent in the final scenes because he was just too big to play a 6-month-old. This hardly makes for a jaw-dropping look at the cutting edge of moviemaking - in fact it only proves the ineptitude of the costume fitters and casting agents.

More failings of the casting department are revealed in a second featurette. Director John Whitesell explains the absence of Paul Giamatti (who featured in the first film), saying, "The truth is he had three other movies going and it just didn't look like it was going to work." Which is obviously a polite way of saying that since he starred in Sideways he doesn't have to slum it anymore. Unfortunately Nia Long (as the love interest) has no such luck, but Lawrence insists that it's their honest rapport that keeps her coming back. "We keep it real," he explains, "We don't sugar coat nothing, we just say what we feel."

Trimming The Fat

There's not even a titter among 12 deleted and extended scenes. The footage is mostly made up of off-cuts from Zachery Levi's performance (who replaced Giamatti as Lawrence's sidekick) and he makes bitter jokes about this in an optional commentary with Whitesell. The director doesn't care too much about his feelings though. He explains that a romantic subplot between Zachary's character and a fellow agent played by Carrie Fuller was cut because "nobody was really that concerned with the romance". Elsewhere, he reveals that a car chase had to be trimmed because "it didn't cut together very well". Yeah, that's called bad directing, John...

Producer David Friendly sits in with Whitesell and Levi for a humdrum main commentary. He assures us that, "Underneath all the good comedy and high jinks there's a lot of heart to these movies," while Whitesell again overlooks Levi to offer the theory that Nia Long "is integral to the movie's success" because she provides that soft gooey centre. It's no wonder Levi struggles to get over the fact that so many of his scenes were cut so he whines about that again between occasional bits of behind-the-scenes trivia. Apparently one of the more daunting challenges facing the production was how wide to make Big Momma's thong. According to Whitesell the first pair were "too wide for Nia's arms to hold it out straight." Frankly, that's as in-depth as this commentary gets.

Like the rippled mounds encasing Lawrence's body, this package of extras is really just a lot of empty padding.

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